What does that mean, not in the house?
He stopped the podcast, softening. Moles were tunnelling in the front garden, he said. His father had abandoned the roller, conceding the area in the hope they’d be happy there and call it a day.
But moles like tunnelling, he went on. It’s not a war you can win with them. They swim through the earth. If I was blind I’d do it too. But obviously my mother is losing sleep over it.
Anne hated the idea of losing control of her property, whether to me when I tried to help her with domestic tasks, or to the moles, the crowning glory being the lawn at the back which she mowed in stripes sitting on top of a large machine. When she was not mowing she gazed at it from the kitchen window or watched protectively from the door.
Luke had found a vibrating device that claimed to deter moles, believing it was better to use preventative measures rather than combative ones. He suspected his mother still kept a supply of strychnine, despite it being outlawed.
Outside the breeding season, he continued, moles live alone and defend their tunnels aggressively. Maybe several will inhabit the same area, but each makes a separate system. She goes after them when she’s mowing but they burrow right down and instead she kills everything else in her path. Frogs and voles get spattered everywhere. I’ve convinced her to let me use a scythe for the long grass, that way they have a chance to escape.
He began telling me about his rewilding plans to convert one part of the garden into a meadow, and I stopped following him.
Some of the times I felt most sure of Luke involved watching him free wild animals. In France he’d saved a small green frog from the bath by throwing a wet cloth over it and carrying it outside. The frog kept coming back. It did not want to exist in a state of nature, preferring the cool sarcophagus of the bath despite our looming presence over him. Maybe, I suggested, it felt safer there from other predators.
Around the time I moved into his flat, a bird fell down the chimney and beat against the window. Luke guided it down to waist height with the soft end of a broom. I stood dumbly by, conscious my ovaries were pulsing. When I couldn’t turn the window locks, he made me take the bird. I was afraid to touch it, and the fear only intensified when I did, the throb of tiny life, the crush of feathers ossified inside my hands. I didn’t mention my father’s nets, hung in trees so we could catch birds like it to eat.
He punched the horn in warning as we approached a bend.
When we started seeing each other, I’d asked him just to drive me around. He said I was likely the only person aroused by authority in the form of the highway code. I’d made a joke (auto-eroticism) but he’d looked blank. Now I imagined him driving other girls for whom the car itself was the fetish. I saw him going faster along these lanes, someone’s sandy foot, toe ring on leather, blonde hair furious in the wind.
Did you ever surf? I asked suddenly, interrupting him.
He paused, narrowing his eyes. Why?
No reason.
We’d once pulled into a disused quarry somewhere not far from where we were, and I’d tried to persuade him to fuck me against the car. In the end he let me go down on him. It was the first time he’d allowed this and I remember his visible shock when I swallowed the mouthful like seawater. I’d sensed that I’d misjudged him, or misunderstood something much greater about that act. Before we met I’d always been looking to please this way. Confusing the desire to please with my own pleasure. But as we drove out of the quarry, I saw him revising his understanding of who I was also, and felt as if something solid beneath me had given way.
As we got closer to his parents’, the cat’s eyes began to shine from the road, the headlights making a pale wreath ahead of us, illuminating the side of a cottage daubed with the words ENGLISH OUT.
We passed the church where Luke’s parents got married, which I knew would be the theme of our weekend. Then, at the end of the tarmac, I touched his hand. I had the feeling, close to homesickness, of longing to be there even though I was. Finally, the garden wall covered in lichen, the barking of the dog.
As a child I’d fantasised about a low-beamed, thatch-roofed cottage from British children’s books, and no matter how many times I arrived, it still felt like stepping inside that fantasy.
We entered the hall as, from the back garden, Anne came in, carrying a torch and covered in dirt. Her grey hair had turned white in the sun. She gestured to her smock and gardening gloves, then walked toward the sink with her hands up as if I held a gun.
Michael appeared behind her. He had to stoop, and from this posture, the tic of rolling his shoulders and his beak of a nose, I’d always associated him with a large bird. More blood vessels had broken across his face, darkest on the chin where white tufts of hair also sprouted. When he leant toward me I saw the deep folds of skin that intersected at his neck. His scalp was mottled brown. I tried to imagine Luke at that age.
Train OK?
Fine, thanks.
Luke got you OK?
Yes.
Given that we were both standing there, I wondered if this question was meant to draw attention to the fact I was reliant on him to drive me, as well as everything else.
Oh I nearly forgot. Congratulations!
Well, he corrected himself, it’s Luke who is lucky.
I appreciated this. Any indication they did not view me as a parasite, looking for a fold in their family. I made that sound that is laughter without smiling and placed the hand with the ring on Luke’s chest, leaning into his shoulder in a way that was supposed to be a parody. It had made his friends laugh but Michael only nodded.
Upstairs, I unpacked and Luke sat on the bed, leaning back on his elbows. A book had been left at an angle on the desk. I turned it over. A volume of poetry by a Cornish poet. This was Anne’s mode of diplomacy. Not poetry as such, but objects she thought I’d like left out without explanation.
Luke pulled me onto the bed. The distant look was gone. He climbed over me and I smiled. I felt powerful and steady and stopped his hands in their tracks.
We should help your mum.
He froze for a moment, then groaned, pushed his erection against his stomach with his waistband.
Anne gave me a pile of new napkins to put out instead of the ones I’d used to set the table. They were decorated with little blue pictures and accompanying Cornish nouns.
There’s a picture in their downstairs toilet, a framed photo of their whole extended family, all smiles except Michael, mid-soliloquy. They’re standing by the monument to Dorothy Pentreath – supposedly the last person who conversed in that language.
When the table was done, Anne gave us beans to shell. My way was to split their seams gently and slide them along, Luke’s was to snap the pod in the middle and press, so they shot out like bullets, ringing against the pan.
Anne stood at the sink peeling potatoes until I noted a small yellow fly on Luke’s shirt and she spun round, pointing the peeler at me.
There were so many bloody apricots over the summer I had to make buckets of jam. And then the flies came. They were out of control. I had to make a trap – she indicated the counter where a glass bowl was filled with liquid – using vinegar. Not as good as the sticky paper but we ran out. Chaos. I tell you now, I nearly lost my mind.
She flushed, pinged the elastic of her neckline and blew back her white fringe. Luke bent over the bowl, wrinkling his nose, and I came closer too, thinking of bleeding apricots. Some flies had drowned but many more sat on the rim, watching their friends sink into amber. There was something languid about the scene, like the aftermath of a wild party.
The first meal I had in that house I realised that the plates we were eating off were the exact same as my aunt’s when I lived with her in Glasgow. In Glasgow, I’d felt the same sensation, seeing that my aunt had the same lace crochet table runner as my mother – an uncanny effect of making me feel less at home. Every time I sat down to a meal Anne had made, I had the urge to comment on them. I stopped myself. Other than being dull
, I worried it sounded like I was trying to prove something.
Anne took her seat finally and said, Well. She wanted to discuss our wedding. I tried not to look at her crowded little mouth. Full of overlapping teeth like a shark. A bone from the fish pie stuck in my throat, scratching it, so that I kept trying to clear it even after it was gone. Each time I did, everyone would stop talking and look at me expectantly and I would have to wave the conversation on. Luke seemed reluctant to engage so his mother couldn’t get very far with her questioning.
Here, Anne said as I cleared my throat again, eat some bread.
Michael changed the subject to their war with some neighbours. Second-homers who’d complained that the trees in Luke’s parents’ garden obscured their view. A petition was sent. Anne didn’t recognise any of the names. Now two trees had fallen within weeks of each other, though there’d hardly been a breeze.
They know we know they poisoned them, she said. I suppose we’re lucky they fell toward the road. But there might be more any day now. Or as we sleep. We could all be killed. I’ve asked Paul to have a look.
Until the first – and only – time I saw his parents in London, I’d thought they had no fears. Then Anne said she had heard my university was a hotbed of terrorism and she seemed eroded, standing there in our kitchen.
She had once been in the news, I remembered as we cleared the table, with the headline BRAVE LOCAL WOMAN SURVIVES COLLAPSE. While walking the dog along a cliff she’d spotted something strange – the land moving – and filmed the moment when a section of cliff collapsed onto the beach. In the interview with a local reporter she says that the sea, which had always seemed to her like a defensive moat, had threatened to eat her up. I searched for it again. There were now links to other reports about sea defences, a story of a man in Southwold who was fighting both nature and bureaucracy at once, and a scientific study which claimed Cornwall had at one time formed part of France, owing to a clear geological boundary.
*
After dinner we sat in front of a documentary. A penguin couple arched their necks in a synchronised, hypnotic dance. The ritual helped the pair to bond, the voice-over explained. Luke, lips dark with wine, provided meta-narration based on the extent to which the programme anthropomorphised its subjects.
I liked the superimposed narratives. The animals wanted the same things I did. We learned that puffins die at thirty, have one offspring at a time, and mate for life.
I don’t believe it, Luke said, they must get divorced.
But even he was transfixed by the bowerbird. Michael liked the way it could shrink and expand its pupils to seduce. Anne admired its thatch of orchid stems and neatly planted lawn. Luke said the way the bird accumulated and displayed treasures in its theatre reminded him of someone, meaning me.
What’s the opposite of anthropomorphise? I said.
Dehumanise, Michael said, unaware, again, I’d made a joke.
Zoomorphism, Luke corrected.
I’d watched a lot of TV the summer my sister and I arrived in the UK. I sat indoors with the curtains drawn watching Home Front when it was still hosted by Tessa Shaw. After that came Changing Rooms, Better Homes, Grand Designs. We hadn’t been able to watch TV for months at a time so my aunt allowed it at first. It was perhaps the easiest way to deal with me. Then she let it go on as it became clear I was gaining a precocious vocabulary: feature walls, imitation mahogany, local vernacular.
By the time I started my new school, I felt a primitive desire for accumulation. I lusted after swag curtains and ornaments visible through the windows on more affluent streets. I stole small items from children in my class. The first was a gaudy tassel from the skirt of an armchair which I stored in a shoebox under my bed. It had relieved the tight feeling in my chest for a few days.
After the main programme ended and the bit about how it was made came on, Michael returned to his crossword.
Shibboleth, he barked suddenly. Five letters.
We were silent for a while. All I could think of was Doris Salcedo’s crack in the Turbine Hall floor.
I wish they gave clues, I said at last.
His eyebrows jumped and then the three of them burst into laughter. I smiled though I didn’t get the joke, then for real as I understood, and then, with a radiating warmth because Anne had put her arm around my shoulder in a clumsy way – a hug, in essence – and I felt as if I’d finally stepped over her threshold. I had a vision of the four of us in the cottage, seen in cross section. Miniature figures, like in a doll’s house, moving between scenes. I saw us from the other side of this vertical plane, from where I seemed a part of it.
Upstairs, undressing, I held him off again. Then I lay back to read the poetry book.
The poet was deaf-blind, the foreword said. People wrote on his hand so he could communicate. He was also a self-proclaimed sex mystic.
Have your parents read this?
Luke, his face now deep in the pillow, was unresponsive.
I tried to feel my way into the deprivation of those two senses, to step into being deaf-blind like an analgesic suit. I imagined it like a special power of concentration.
The poet wrote about the landscape of china clay mining. I’d seen some of what remained: the scars, the quarries turned lakes. Luke had taken me to the Eden Project – built in reclaimed china clay pits, now home to a transplanted forest. It had been the first time he talked to me in any detail about biodiversity – his field.
I remember first explicitly wanting to marry him that day, moved by how much he seemed to care about future lives. That went on my mental list with filial loyalty and the way he liked to do repairs, or own things that needed constant maintenance. All things which suggested reliability.
I put the book down, turned off the light and lay my head beside his. A rush of warmth spread across the pillow. The bead of water that had rolled into the canals of my ear on the last day of our French holiday had tormented me at first, but by then, two weeks later, it must have travelled to a sanctum so deep inside I’d ceased to feel it. Now it was gone, I felt rehabilitated. I lay on my side, holding him from behind, imagining the day when this house would be ours.
The water cooled beneath my cheek. I could feel the whirr of sleeplessness accelerating. I tried to imagine us living in a simpler time. In the time of china clay mining. I could see myself with an auburn dog and soft-bellied children: blob-like shapes, legs blotted with pink bruises. They ran around and splashed in the craters filled with turbid water.
I did fall asleep but had one of my recurring dreams in which I can’t. These are almost exact replicas of the nights in which I lie awake. The night sky is always a saturated yellow, like there will be a storm but there never is. The window is broken, or I can’t close it, but there is a metal bowl beneath a drain pipe, catching rainwater for someone to drink. The drips ring out, unpredictable, all night. I try to focus on falling asleep. Then, with the effort of doing so, I wake.
3
In the middle of the night – the real night – Anne flung open the door. She was the kind of mother who refused to knock. A fan of borders but not boundaries.
They’ve dug up all the courgettes, she said.
The moles?
Much worse. Forget the moles.
Neither of us moved.
Come on – she flipped the lights – we’re being besieged. Get a shovel. Anya you can hold a torch.
Michael refused to be routed. I heard him insist Anne respect his sleep – she was more than intimidating enough to handle marauding boar.
Outside, we took in the destruction. Mounds of earth uprooted, shredded plants, craters, gougings and tracks disfiguring the lawn.
Monsters, she spat.
It’s not their fault, Luke said.
Whose is it then?
They were hunted to extinction then reintroduced. Deliberately. By us.
I never introduced pigs to my garden.
They were here first, then we killed them off and got nostalgic for it.
<
br /> Luke. I’m an animal person so spare me the sermon, please. But this – she gestured around. This is ridiculous. They go after dogs. They laid waste to Pem’s farm. Last time I heard one run along the decking I leant out the window and shot it. It was like a bomb going off. All the mud and dust. Took four of us to put it in Pem’s truck. Very good meat, so it was probably worth the carnage, in the end.
Luke stopped digging, closed his eyes and exhaled.
Your mum’s – she seems manic, I whispered. Do you think we – you – should make her lie down?
He mumbled something about going to get a glass of water but never came back. I finished our end of the trench alone.
After several hours digging, erecting fortifications using upturned chairs, I realised I was enjoying myself. I felt useful working alongside Anne, and it reminded me of my childhood, when anything could be reimagined into something new. Shoes became firewood, sheets became windows, my brother’s skateboard became a water cart. But the objects I gravitated toward aesthetically now, I realised as I positioned two dining chairs like coping stones, all had an underlying stability. The sculptural things I collected maybe did have emotional resonance then, in that I couldn’t imagine them transmuting into anything else.
Finally Anne surveyed the barricades. Seagulls called overhead and I followed her gaze to where the perimeter disappeared into the dawn mist and then the creek.
That should do it, she said. For now at least.
I crept back into bed beside Luke and admired the crescents of black dirt under my nails. I kissed the warm skin at the back of his neck. Then I remembered the poisoned trees.
Asylum Road Page 3